How Britain Views the U.S. Elections
MARQUAND, DAVID
A TEST FOR DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT How Britain Views the U.S. Elections By David Marquand London American Presidential elections usually evoke strong emotions in this country. The British people...
...It is true that Enoch Powell, the British George Wallace, does not speak with an Alabama drawl, and was once a Professor of Greek...
...A large part of Wallace's appeal, one gathers, is that he appears to say what he thinks...
...This, of course, is due to the third candidate—but for wider and more painful reasons than his significance in American politics alone...
...When a politician is applauded merely for pushing arguments in a forthright fashion—regardless of their potentially disastrous results?democratic government is certainly in danger...
...He is so no longer...
...In 1952 opinion here was more divided, but by 1956 Britain was solidly for Stevenson, and in 1960 it was even more solidly for Kennedy...
...It is also becoming clear that the message is being listened to...
...How great the danger is depends, to be sure, on the amount of support such a politician gets...
...The British people desperately wanted Roosevelt to win in 1940 and 1944, and were only slightly less committed to Truman in 1948...
...It seems clear that a large and growing section of the white working class in the United States no longer accepts the basic premises of modern liberalism, and that the ideological gulf between liberal intellectuals and urban workers has grown so wide that they are no longer prepared to forget their differences to keep out a common enemy...
...The same is true of the second striking feature of the Wallace campaign...
...But Wallace has shown that this alliance is crumbling...
...It was true of the British Liberal party before 1914 and of the British Labor party after 1945...
...The tensions and frustrations that account for his appeal have their equivalents here...
...Now the pattern has changed...
...The cement of democracy is compromise, and compromise necessitates some blurring of the issues...
...Still, it would be wrong to end on too gloomy a note...
...Now his liberal record is (most unfairly) forgotten, and his support has evaporated...
...Yet the subtleties of Enoch Powell, political thinker and ex-professor of Greek, do not account for his popularity...
...the pseudo-solutions he offers sound uncannily reminiscent of the pseudo-solutions offered in this country...
...But it is rapidly becoming clear that if the voice is the voice of Jacob, the message is the message of Esau...
...Britain, in short, now has her own "Radical Right," of unknown but alarming dimensions...
...After all, they couldn't happen here...
...The chief interest of the current Presidential election for Britain lies in seeing whether this happens before election day or after it...
...Leftists could even use it as a stick to beat the United States: one more proof that, despite their rhetoric, Americans were far behind the old country in the arts of democratic politics...
...Like Wallace, Powell has shown that the gulf between the intellectual and working-class wings of the Labor party is wider than most Labor politicians have been ready to admit...
...This is precisely why he is dangerous...
...and that in an age of carefully-processed computer politicians, who never say anything at all if they can help it, a man who says what he thinks can have an explosive impact almost irrespective of the nature of his thoughts...
...bly have been as popular in this country as Kennedy was...
...As a result, Wallace's campaign has a direct and painful relevance for us in a way not true of Huey Long or Joe McCarthy...
...From this side of the Atlantic, two things are particularly striking about the Wallace campaign, especially when it is looked at side by side with Eugene McCarthy's campaign a few months ago...
...This is the first Presidential election since the United States became a world power in which the British public has so far been given no reason to feel strongly in favor of?or strongly opposed to—either of the two main candidates...
...It was true of the American Democratic party during the New Deal, and, indeed, as recently as six or eight years ago...
...Eight years ago Hubert Humphrey seemed closer to the central tradition of the British Left than any other major American politician, and if he had won the Democratic nomination then he would probaDavid Marquand, a Labor MP, contributes frequently to these pages...
...But while neither Humphrey nor Nixon evokes much enthusiasm in this country, the campaign itself has already aroused a kind of horrified fascination, which seems certain to become even more intense as election day draws nearer...
...Once upon a time, the British liberal intelligentsia could afford to look down its nose at the mixture of Southern racism and Midwestern populism typified by Governor Wallace without feeling any personal involvement in the outcome...
...But there can no longer be any doubt that it exists —and that it exists, moreover, not only on obvious issues like race relations or the reform of the abortion laws, but on social and economic issues as well...
...All this is now a memory...
...Sooner or later they are certain to do so, for these forces are too deeply embedded in both countries to be swept away...
...What George Wallace has done in the United States, Enoch Powell has done here...
...Powell is, of course, a far more intelligent and subtle man than Wallace, and his political philosophy is not nearly as simple as it seems at first sight...
...In Wallace's case, it is clear that the danger is not negligible...
...All successful progressive parties in modern industrial societies have been built on a tacit alliance between the urban working class and the liberal intelligentsia...
...Eight years ago Richard Nixon was a hate figure to British liberals, just as he was to their American counterparts...
...Even in 1964, although Lyndon Johnson had few passionate supporters here, Barry Goldwater had plenty of passionate opponents...
...Here, too, there is an obvious parallel with Enoch Powell...
...The reason he appeals to a large and growing number of Englishmen is that he sounds simple and straightforward even though he is not, and that he gives the impression that he is willing to say what he thinks without counting the cost...
...Even the most complacent sections of the British Left have been forced during the last few months to recognize that George Wallace is not a uniquely transatlantic figure, and that the emotions to which he appeals are not uniquely transatlantic either...
...The second is the revolt against the necessary evasions and compromises of democratic politics...
...The threat that Wallace and Powell represent to democratic government will be overcome if the forces of reason and compromise rally and fight back...
...True, the division in this country ENOCH POWELL is not as great as in the United States, if only because the issues that have created it are less pressing and dramatic than they are in the United States...
...Unless it is bridged, the future of the Left, both in Britain and in the United States, could be darker and more hazardous than it has been for decades...
...How wide this gulf has become we shall know on election day...
...Thus, although the British Left feared and hated Huey Long or Joe McCarthy, it was able to derive a certain perverse satisfaction from the fact that they existed...
...Above all, the political climate which made it possible for him to appeal to those tensions and frustrations and to put forward those spurious solutions is not very different from the political climate in England...
...The first is the alarming breakdown of communication between the two indispensable elements of an effective progressive party in any modern industrial society...
...This is true of the Swedish Social Democrats?the most successful progressive party in the whole Western world...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 20
